relapse
by The Blearing Phoenix
Summary: Au. It's a cold day on Thanksgiving and Inuyasha turns to the one habit he can't kick when everything he holds dear suddenly falls away from him ...  Written to the tune of "Brainy" by The National. One-shot.


au. thanksgiving day gift.

yup . . .

pairing: inuyasha/kagome

genre: drama/hurt/comfort

category: anime—Inuyasha

.relapse.

"I thought you'd quit," I watched as Inuyasha lit up another cigarette and leaned against the side of the building—against the brick and cement that workers hundreds of years ago had taken the care to build. We were standing outside of our old elementary school, the one we used to scrape our knees and build snow angels behind when we were little, the one that our childhood was sealed inside of. We were growing up now and nothing could stop it, we grew up as fast as the filtering band on Inuyasha's cigarette burned and peeled away into black staining ash.

"Nope," he said, pressing his top and bottom lips together against the cellophane casing of the proffered cigarette in question. He took a drag and I watched as the near invisible wisps of smoke curled and unfurled like some smoky snake. I hated it. My dad died to it and yet here I was . . . glued to the sidewalk, watching one of the kids from my Home Economics class smoke.

"Will you ever . . .?" and my voice died in the whistling wind as it picked up speed and power. I pulled the lapels of my black coat flush against my too-pale neck—my skin like milk in the dimness of the sulfurous lighting. Then I watched him and saw his honey-amber eyes glow cat-like under the streetlamps.

"Kagome,"and then he turned to me, and he looked a lot older than seventeen then; and I felt a lot smaller than just being 5'5" at that moment and it didn't matter to me that he reached 5'9" and I only touched his chest when I dared to get a fraction of an inch closer to him. His voice was a gruff warning, laced with the black ash that was currently stuck to his lungs, the tar clinging to his organs like a symbiotic being. He made me feel small, insignificant, nerdy, unwanted, unattainable, like he and I were on different levels, on different stairs . . . and we were and the whole student body could see this inveterate fact except for us. It wasn't inveterate to us, we were blind to it, our eyes were milky white to it.

And his brother . . . Sesshomaru . . .

"I know you don't want to talk about it but sometimes . . . ,"

The wind sliced through my voice like a knife and I watched him as he flicked the ash into the wind. It was like black snowfall, tainted and filthy, like the chemicals and additives that the workers packed into it. It was a death stick, a cancer stick, and sooner or later Inuyasha would succumb to it. Just like . . .

"That's the fucking point! Ha, I ain't gonna talk about this shit anymore. I already deal with my therapist's shit because she keeps askin' me how I feel. Well I pay you hundreds of fuckin' dollars so why don't you tell me how you fuckin' feel about my problems? Because I don't know how to fuckin' feel. I'm like an unopened bottle of wine, I'm corked in too tight. I can't feel, I refuse to, Kags. I refuse to."

I just watched him let himself go to the November cold, the briskness, the chill, as our breaths turned to near white mist. He shivered and pulled himself against me and said nothing, his lips murmuring soundless words into my hairline, it both made my skin crackle with electric thrills and jump at the ticklish sensations. Each skin cell burst with life as his lips made contact with my hair follicle and then brushed softly against the skin of my forehead. His glove-covered hands squeezed my shoulders reassuringly as the comforted became the comforter. Our roles reversed in this unvoiced contract, somewhere along the span of ten minutes, I'd signed my name on the dotted line and Inuyasha became my protector, my stalwart guardian, my everything.

And I didn't want him to be. So I pushed him away with feeble hands and a strong heart in my throat.

"Talk to me about it or I will leave, Inuyasha." I was defiant and I was serious. For months he'd closed himself off, cloaking himself in a metaphorical blanket from Miroku, Sango, and me. We'd all tried to pry him open and fix his broken parts, to seal away his hurt, and break down his disappointments but it was a lost cause. Inuyasha held fast and blasted Black Sabbath, Slayer, Judas Priest and Metallica until his bedroom walls reverberated with the pulsing loudness of sound. So I tried to be softer, to be motherly, to be like Kikyo. Kikyo his ex, I tried to emulate her. I watched as he crushed the newly discarded cigarette under his Vans and his amber eyes met my shit brown ones.

"What do ya wanna know, Kags?"

"Everything."

So he told me everything under the starry veil of indigo sky. He told me how his father had, while he was fully intoxicated, put a fully loaded nine millimeter into his mouth, with the barrel clenched between his teeth. How his father had pulled the trigger and blown his head off. How Sesshomaru's mother was the one to walk into the office, dropping to the ground behind her fuck buddy's cold, lifeless body and scream shrilly into his blood soaked white button up. How she'd phoned the police with numb fingers, struggling to dial those three numbers as her hands were too slippery with his fresh blood. How she reported it as a suicide even though the cameras installed in his office recorded the whole thing so the evidence was liable to be played back in the police station. How his world turned upside down and how his mother was almost catatonic for three days because . . .

". . . she was his wife an' up until this point she had no clue that my older bro's old lady was bangin' our dad. She didn't even know that Sesshomaru's mom was the secretary of our dad." How Sesshomaru was taken into live with Inuyasha's mom and how it took them months to recover from it. How . . .he told me how Sesshomaru experimented with drugs, Xanax, cocaine, heroin, LSD, tobacco, he did almost everything. And how a few days ago he got the call from the principal and then the hospital that had tried in vain to revive his brother, that Sesshomaru had died from an overdose of Xanax and heroin in one of the boy's bathrooms.

I watched him crumble against me like this small inconsequential thing, immeasurable if only for the grief he expressed through his muffled wailing. He fell heavily against me and we half fell and half sat as I rocked him back and forth, my fingers itching to run through his silken white hair but instead I merely caressed the crown of his head and vowed to silently give him what he had given me for nearly ten years of my life: protection.

xoxo. The Blearing Phoenix.

Happy belated Turkey Day!


End file.
